Canada Malting Company, Toronto
The Canada Malting Silos are located on the west side of Toronto’s Harbourfront. Situated at the foot of Bathurst Street at Queen’s Quay. The silos were built in 1928 to store malt hops for the Canada Malting Company, which was later expanded in 1944. It was an important work of industrial architecture in it’s time because grain elevators had previously been built out of wood, which made them particularly vulnerable to fire as grain has a potential for spontaneously combusting. The main silos, 15 in total, are 120 meters in height, the additional storage bins built to the north in 1944 are 150 meters.
Canada Malting was decommissioned in 1987 as they wound down their operations to consolidate in Thunder bay. Subsequently it was designated a heritage site by the city of Toronto. Many wacky ’schemes’ (proposals) have been put forward in its 21 year history of sitting vacant including a school/community center, which actually ended up being built right next to the malt plant, and an interesting conversion proposal for a crematorium called “Library of Lives” which was declined in favor of Metronome, who proposed to convert the silos into a music museum. Not surprisingly, nothing materialized from these harebrained proposals that all lacked sufficient financial investors.
Little known fact : One of the silos still has grain it.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Manufacturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.